Monday, June 12, 2017

One Last Pick Through the Bins, Volume 29: Hammerbox, The Gits, And My Initial, Limited Grasp of the Exotic

Sometimes, you lose too much when you only focus on the plumage.

I first became aware of Hammerbox by way of a happy version
of the ominous whisperings that start a fantasy movie – basically, along the
lines of people “hearing tell” about something strange passing through a
familiar world. There was nothing ominous about them, of course: the words was
that the band’s lead singer, Carrie Akre, could sing – I mean, actually sing. If
that sounds like an odd thing to say about any lead singer in a band, time and
place had a lot to do with it. Also, just about anyone who heard the comment
immediately understood its meaning.

A lead singer has to command a stage – that’s the barest
prerequisite, no matter the genre – but Akre really did stand out because so
much of what I listened to (and still listen to) accepts of lot of shortcuts
around a clean, strong, powerful set of pipes. Carrying a tune, or expressing/manifesting
an attitude or persona…just so does the trick often enough. Akre’s voice cleared
the “clear, strong” bar without even one thread of her dress touching it (and I
always remember her in dresses, and the way she danced while not singing; it
worked), and, until this week, I rated their music highly enough to pick up
their eponymous debut about five years ago, but I didn’t have to pay for it,
either (seems relevant).

I don’t have a lot to say about Hammerbox after that. I
liked them, even went to see shows they featured in mostly to see them, but the
only song of theirs that I carried in my head from past to picking up Hammerbox
again was “Texas Ain’t So Bad, Really.” Some other songs came back when I
listened again – “Bred,” “Under the Moon” (which should have stuck, because, good tune; gratifying video, too, because it gives a taste of them live),
and “Ask Why” – and I’m glad to kinda/sorta have them again – that is, Spotify
doesn’t have Hammerbox’s debut album, but I can always stare at the mpegs in
the folder on my desktop (that I can’t play), or find the songs on Youtube (as
I did above). Then again, something about having a goddamn large music store in
my back pocket (a smartphone and Spotify) and at least a galaxy’s worth of
music to explore turns that tiny little barrier into the Great Wall of
China…only one built to undercut effort instead repelling Mongols.

Spotify does have Hammerbox’s second album, Numb, but that
one didn’t grab me the same way their debut album still does. Whoever made it
carried “When 3 is 2” forward from Hammerbox, but Numb feels less varied
overall, almost as if the band’s trying to fill an artistic space that’s at
least half commercial (i.e., it sounds like branding). At any rate, Akre left
after that album to form Goodness, and the only thing I’ve heard by them is the song they recorded for Schoolhouse Rocks Rocks! (cute song!). That would
literally be all I had to say for this post…if I didn’t spend all of last week,
when I supposed to focus on Hammerbox, thinking about The Gits.

To address something obvious up top, yes, something about stuffing
two female-fronted bands into one volume feels like short-changing both of
them, but I’m sticking with it for two reasons: one, neither band put out a ton
of work, and neither band had a ton of range. The second reason is
half-confessional: my brain just lumped them together – because, two female
singers - and I think that’s the way more than a few male brains work. I’m not
sure that most people’s brains don’t work that way, to be honest, but that’s a
massive, freighted subject for another day. Moreover, pairing Hammerbox with
The Gits (or pitting them against one another?) goes some distance to defusing
that stupid, conceivably chauvinistic shortcut. And that notion turns on one
strong opinion:

Hammerbox was good, and Akre really can sing (seriously,
that’s opera-diva level in my universe), but The Gits were goddamn awesome.

Just like with Hammerbox, one of The Gits songs followed me
through life – “Second Skin,” which, for me, is just a holy shit song, almost
required listening – but the one song, “Slaughter of Bruce,” is the one that always comes to me when I think of them performing. And it’s here where the defining
difference between Hammerbox comes in: when I think of Hammerbox, what I
remember is Akre, hiking up a long dress, so she could rocked her hips back and forth and
toss around her short haircut, just sort of performing while they band played;
with The Gits, I think of the guitarist, strumming and bouncing up and down
with “Slaughter of Bruce’s” beat and smiling, just grinning like an idiot,
because he was having so much goddamn fun up there. (UPDATE: In fairness, I've been watching videos of live performances as I dropped links into this post...this does not come through.)

That brings in Mia Zapata, lead singer of The Gits…and
here’s where it gets tricky. Her death remains one of the saddest, most fucked-up things I’ve ever been even remotely near. I say this wanting to
separate myself as far as possible from anyone who genuinely grieved after her
death, anyone who knew Zapata at all (unlike me), but Seattle’s music
community, and close watchers of it (like me), absolutely felt a loss. When you
see a band at tiny venues, spaces where it takes nothing but walking to stand
right in front of the stage, the relationship to the artist can’t help but feel
more intimate; walking up to say “hi” and “good show” takes nothing more than
deciding to do it. That doesn’t make these people your friends, or even
acquaintances. Still, you feel like you know them on some level, even if you
don’t.

In the memory referenced above, the guitarist, Joe Spleen,
was smiling at Zapata. She felt like the beating heart of that band, its voice,
its character, and its drive, utterly magnetic. For all that – and this is
1,000% projection - The Gits looked as if they operated very democratically. And
I guess that’s the distinction I’m drawing. To be clear, I know no details
about either band, so this is framing. Akre felt more like a performer with a
back-up band - a good singer sat in front of a band doing something close to
what everyone else was doing, only with a woman – while The Gits functioned
like a group that found their perfect spokesman in Zapata.

Well, that’s enough with my loose theories and sexual
politics; it’s time to talk about the music. If you just listen to Numb,
Hammerbox comes off as a vaguely grunge-y act h better vocals. That sells their
overall work short, and I really do encourage people to give a listen to the songs linked to
above (third paragraph), because those are decent songs that skip neatly around
a cookie-cutter. A couple songs off Numb worked for me – “Trip” and “Sleep” stand
out – but Hammerbox’s biggest contribution to my particular point of view came
with showing me a different kind of female performer. It wasn’t a totally new
concept or anything – I knew singers like Blondie’s Debbie Harry, Pat Benatar, The
Go-Gos (who I knew too little about to properly respect), and even Janis Joplin
– but the broad popular species of female singer was the chanteuse (e.g.
Whitney Houston) or…well, just Madonna. In that sense, Akre felt like the
future and a throwback all at once, a chance to see something like some of the
legends I’d missed.

Zapata was something else altogether. By the time I was
hearing The Gits, I was also bouncing into X and L7 (a documentary I watched last night on Zapata's murder reminded me of 7-Year Bitch), and all that, together,
broadened my conception to where I actually grasped that all the boundaries of
what women could do in music were (and are) imaginary, or less politely, bullshit.
Moreover, The Gits still stride proudly among my personal pantheon of live
acts. They always looked thoroughly thrilled to be on stage, and with each
other, and everything they played tended toward…high tempo. They play my
personal favorite brand/tempo of punk – hence the love. It’s basic rock, only
bare-knuckled and rippling with defiance. That last note obliges me to touch on
the tragedy one last time, because that was such a big part of it. Zapata came
off as more than tough; she actually projected a kind of power, and in a way
that deepened the shock of her murder. The woman who sang those songs, and with
so much power and charisma, just made what happened to her that much more
unbelievable.

I can’t transition to happy stuff after that, so I won’t
even try, but I want to close on The Gits’ music. In the years that passed
since I’d heard them, they’d morphed into something of a “bar band” in my head,
but, having listened to them over this past week, I think they play closer to straight-up
punk. And that’s punk, not grunge. There, I’m thinking songs like (well, short list) “I’m Lou,” “Spear and Magic Helmet,” “Here’s to Your Fuck,” and the
shoulda-been-a-classic “Drunks.”

There’s more where that came from – and, no, not all of it
listens as fresh to me; as much as I like the punk sound, it gets stale,
especially when the same band’s playing it – but I also hear enough musicality
and/or musical knowledge in songs like “Second Skin,” “Another Shot of Whiskey,”
“It All Dies Anyway,” “Still You Don’t Know What It's Like,” or their performance of “A Change Is Gonna Come” and “Graveyard Blues” to make me wonder what The Gits would have
done next. Some of the hooks in their more obvious punk songs did enough to
make you wonder. And, as noted above, and with some repetition, The Gits were
just super fun – and that comes out in songs like “Italian Song” (remember loving this one live) and “Drinking Song,” as well as something like “Drunks.”

Hammerbox got seriously short-shrift in the playlist I
created to accompany this post; they probably got less respect in this post
than they deserved, but I really do feel like they broadened my understanding
of not just music, but the world (even if a lot of the super-structure only
arrived with this week’s meditations). The Gits, though, always held a very
real place in music as I experienced it. By way of some kind of accidental bonus,
there’s a live performance of a song called “Social Love I” on their third(?)
album, Enter the Conquering Chicken (and, jay-sus, am I just now getting to
this? Their other albums were Kings and Queens and – my personal favorite, as
in find it if you can – Frenching the Bully; great, great punk album). At the
end of the song, Zapata lists the bands that were to close out that night at
Portland’s X-Ray Café (a place I never made it to; true story). Gas Huffer,
Christ on a Crutch, and Big Red House…and, with that, I’ll do something rare: drift
off into nostalgia. Sometimes, that’s the only way you can have something…